Konftel, a European-based manufacturer of conference phones, is celebrating its 20^th year in business. The company is planning to soon release a book that outlines its first two decades.

 

The book describes how the company came into being in a basement workshop, how it benefited from the IT bubble of the 1990s, and the implications of moving its production facilities to China.

 

In 1988, Gunnar Ekström of Ekström Management and Investment, now Chairman of the Board for Konftel, teamed-up with two partners — John-Erik Eriksson (now acoustic designer at Konftel) and Peter Renkel (now CEO at Konftel) — to invent a new conference phone that could connect simultaneous phone conversations with no echo noise. The resulting phone was based on patented OmniSound audio technology. Today, all Konftel's conference phones are based on this audio technology.

 

Konftel said that its patented OmniSound audio technology enables users to talk and move freely about the room while on conference calls. It features full duplex and 360 degree sound recording and reproduction, thereby providing clear voice transmission. The company's conference phones feature an ultra-sensitive microphone, enabling omni-directional sound transmission. Three built-in surround speakers provide high-quality audio with no clipping, damping or echoes.

 

Features of Konftel OmniSound 2.0 technology include suppression of background noise, wideband voice transmission (7 kHz frequency for VoIP calls), and an equalizer that allows adjustment of sound during calls.  

 

The Swedish telecommunications company Telia was the first to sell Konftel's conference phones to its customers.

 

The company also announced plans to expand into the U.S. market.